So this is a bit of a weird subject that's very, very difficult to discussion rationally on almost any part of the Internet, but I think /his/ should be a little less triggered by it.

It's been said that child prostitution was pretty prevalent in Western Europe even up to the 18th Century. Even England didn't take steps to end child prostitution until 1885. But what fueled this and maintained this economy of child sex workers? Were people just more accepting of pedophilia back then or was it just like Internet piracy, impossible to stamp out entirely?

Historically, how have most civilzations tried to handle pedophilia? The Greeks are often brought up as exemplars of "tolerance" in regards to sexual deviancy; was this something that they had few problems with? The Romans have a reputation, perhaps unearned, for being little boy fanciers. Is /his/tory just being rewritten by pedophiles, or is modern puritanism an aberration?

I'm just genuinely curious about what ancient and medieval cultures thought about pedophilia.

>>267495Well for once if you have children working in factories (or on the fields for that matter) why no make them use all parts of their body to make money?One has to understand that the clear line of child-adult wasn't always as clearly defined, children have been helping their parents where they could since before time, labour laws are a incredebly modern thing.

Pedophilia today is not the same as pedophilia back then. It was typical in medieval society for a girl to get married and start popping out kids as soon as they hit puberty.Ergo, sex at a younger age was alot my typical. Understand too that until Christianity popped up, men on men action wasnt all that frowned upon.

my dear friend, while pedophilia did exist as a concept in the middle ages it was one of those things that were only [morally or by law] sanctioned when it entered the public sphere. since the great majority of those cases never did no one actually cared.

I do not have a source for this but I'm fairly certain it was only the judeo-christian societies where pedophilia was considered "immoral" in any way, shape or form.

the greeks endorsed it. people up until the 19th century were okay with the idea of a grown man marrying a twelve year old.

there were many reasons for that, one being incredibly high child mortality, combined with the fact that farmers often needed five or six successors as a form of "pension". if you do the maths, let's assume half of the children manage to surpass the age of three, that means a woman will have between eight and twelve children, roughly.

in this case you need to start early, especially taking into account that people just weren't as old as we are now and that childbirth after the age of 28+ was highly problematic (it still is).

sorry I cannot tell you more about child prostitution, very interesting aswell.

>>267495I had a seminar on the question.In most (western) countries child labour (thus prostitution) ended with the emergence of democracy and citizenship, around 1900.As soon as people had to vote, to take part to the military service, to become real citizens, they had to be taken care of.Instead of going to the mines as soon as the age of 6, they got an education, and the symbolic age of 18 (20, 21...) appeared. This was mainly for the boys, though, but girls folllowed quickly, since they had a role in the new "republican" "modern" society too.

>>267780So how do you explain, and this is modern here so it might not belong on /his/, the endorsement last year of the Labour Party to lower the voting age to 16? What makes 16 a better nominal age than 18?

>>268205Even worse then. Christfags could at least claim to be concerned with the sanctity of their souls. You're just being a wet blanket.>not that I actually believe that those younger than 18 be of sound enough mind to have sex with someone significantly older than themselves

>>267547Was it though? I thought that was mainly a nobility/aristocracy thing since there's a bunch of marriage records from England and most of them fall into what would generally be considered adulthood.

>>268995Not even that. Marriage records from the Middle Ages show that the Church pretty much only married people above the age of 18. It's not like the number was pulled out of thin air; it's been the age of adulthood for centuries. The only people who got married at like 14 were freaks and perverts or political tools of noble families.

At least, that's the argument of historians who look into this. They ignore the fact that most church records haven't survived down from the Middle Ages, especially those of more rural parishes and churches. It's like arguing that the fossil record is complete.

>>267495I think it's just that people didn't give a shit about children, especially poor children back then. They made them work in factories, and do extremely dangerous jobs that left them deformed for life like chimney sweeping

While it was common for nobility to arrange marriages between kids, and even to marry them officially it was commonly understood that the actual consumation would be postponed. This is because everyone knew that girls can give birth when they're say 13 or 14, but nobody liked this because it puts massive strains on a young developing girl. I recall a medieval noblewoman who wrote how she gave birth at 14 or so, and though everything was fine and she lived to old age she was against impregnating girls as young as she was. Point is in the letters she exchanged with her friends basically everyone (men included) agree with her. This leads me to believe it was a commonly held opinion backed by facts.

People in the Middle Ages usually married around their early 20s, sans aristocracy. Women usually had their first child somewhere in those years.

>>269291It's not as if revisionism hasn't been going on since the beginning of human civilization, but goddamn. They try to make all history look like their modern liberal paradise and it's fucking disgusting how blatant it is.

People get away with paedophilia -- broadly defined -- in our world all the time. Tens of millions look at cartoon porn that is mostly underage, and half the French intellegensia engage in sex tourism in North Africa that is taboo.

Read Barthes, Duvert, and more about 1968. Burroughs etc. for the US. It's just a class thing.

>>267495Learn, OP: Childhood is a modern notion. There never was any attention to it, but to define a complete inability to make decisions on their own. Quite often, children with their nine or ten had to take charge of their lives, and this has always been considered perfectly normal and acceptable.

Thus, it is absurd to speak of "pedophilia" with regard to this context. This notion simply did not exist.

In Renaissance Italy many men saw no problem with fucking an adolescent boy much like the Greeks and Romans. In fact in 1517, half of Florence was arrested for Sodomy.

There was no homosexual identity in the Renaissance, sexuality was more based on the active masculine and the passive female and so if a man was still receiving a fucking when he was an adult, he was the one to usually receive punishment and not the masculine. In fact, the Church in Florence opened up a brothel just to try and stop the amount of sodomy.

In our own culture we usually see as giving a blowjob as passive as you are coerced to give sexual favour to another. However, in the Renaissance giving a blowjob was the masculine, active thing to do.

They had a judicial panel set up in 1432 called "The Office of the Night" whose sole purpose was to charge people with sodomy. 17,000 men were convicted. Many, many more however were brought before the tribunal.

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